The time has come when all Australians, not just Victorians, are forced to pay for the Andrews and Allan governments’ failed socialist experiments.

Incredibly, it was only nine years ago that then treasurer Tim Pallas proudly boasted Victoria ‘continues to outperform the rest of Australia on a number of fronts, with economic growth that is the fastest and strongest in the nation’.

Today’s Victorian Treasurer, Jaclyn Symes, oversees a state performing the worst overall in the nation. Ranked last in four separate metrics, Victoria has the nation’s highest unemployment rate, the highest taxes, the highest per capita debt and the steepest energy price increases.

Last year alone, Victoria’s debt jumped by more than $20 billion and the interest bill surged almost 30 per cent. Next financial year, net debt is set to reach a record $194 billion.

Yet to be funded is the Suburban Rail Loop, a 2018 Labor election promise. Originally costed at $50 billion, it is now projected to total $216 billion. It is believed Premier Allan’s recent, obsequious visit to China was a last-resort attempt to secure funding for the project. Reflecting her neediness, the Premier described Victoria’s China relationship as ‘based on values rather than export transactions’.

Little does she know. But when the North East Link project faces a staggering four-times budget overrun and when two hospitals and the West Gate Tunnel development are likely to be double their original costing, Victoria needs all the help it can get.

This incompetence makes level crossing removals at 60 per cent, the Metro Tunnel at 54 per cent and the Airport Rail Link at 20 per cent, overruns, seem like good budgeting.

For Victorians it’s the promise not the delivery which counts. Like Premier Daniel Andrews, before the last election, promising regional Victorians a ‘(Commonwealth) Games like no other’. With the election behind him and the lowball $2.6 billion estimate suddenly becoming $7 billion, Victorian taxpayers were lucky to escape with a $589 million cancellation penalty. A defiant Andrews refused to apologise.

Given such financial recklessness, the question of probity was bound to follow. Victoria’s integrity watchdog gave little comfort. It found the Andrews government had a ‘culture of corruption and secrecy’ and had improperly awarded a Labor-affiliated union a $1.2 million contract, to deliver training to health workers, which ‘was not in the public interest’.

Premier Jacinta Allan is accused of ‘turning a blind eye’ to the scandal-plagued CFMEU building union’s alleged criminality on taxpayer-funded worksites.

Naturally, the CFMEU is a major beneficiary of Victoria’s undisciplined infrastructure spending. Despite this, over the past three years, the union received almost $3 million from government departments and was in turn a major donor to the ALP at the last state election.

Then there’s the revelation that Victoria’s socially and economically disastrous Covid lockdowns were not based on health advice, as argued at the time, but on decisions unilaterally taken by Daniel Andrews and his cabinet.

This unaccountable mindset has seen a combination of uncontrolled migration, a woke judiciary and weakened bail laws encourage a surge in crime. In the year to June 2025, Victoria recorded an unprecedented 638,640 criminal offences, with aggravated burglary up 27 per cent. A sex-related offence is recorded every 30 minutes and the state accounts for nearly half the nation’s heroin consumption.

Unsolved crimes are at record levels prompting African street gangs to boast, ‘We can get away with anything.’ Indeed, this perverse justice system rewards a depraved father who sexually abused his five-year-old daughter with a couple of years in a female prison.

The government’s solution is to cut $50 million from its 2025-26 police budget, $30 million from the courts, and $169 million from court-related capital expenditure while extending a three-months amnesty for criminals to deposit their weapons in 45 newly installed ‘machete bins’.

As health services slip, Victorians are forced to wait hours for urgent care overnight as paramedic staff shortages, ambulance ramping and pressure on emergency departments grow. Incredibly, Victorians continue to demonstrate remarkable tolerance for Labor’s incompetence and deceit.

Meanwhile, the state faces a perfect storm of rising costs and a diminishing tax base. It has the lowest formation of new businesses in the country and the fastest growth in insolvencies. More than 129,000 Victorian businesses shut last year, while since Covid some 3,254 businesses have moved interstate. The proposed two-day work-from-home mandate will accelerate migration of skills and capital to other jurisdictions.

Highlighting Victoria’s mendicant status, the recent $26 billion allocation from the Commonwealth Grants Commission and a federal $10.3 billion infrastructure investment represented 30 per cent of Victoria’s gross revenue. Inevitably, Victoria’s credit rating will be further downgraded, increasing borrowing costs for all Australians. It will add insult to injury when better-managed states like Western Australia and Queensland are already saying enough is enough and objecting to the Grants Commission redistributing their GST to poorly managed states.

The Grants Commission remains a socialist relic from the 1930s, intended to equalise public service delivery nationwide. In reality, it rewards incompetence, discourages competitive federalism, turns mendicant states into quasi-federal agencies and caters to the endless rent-seeking aspirations of entitled minorities.

As Victoria’s ideological recklessness hits home, movements to reform the Grants Commission, or even federation itself, will grow. Calls for prosperous regions within states to press for statehood will also intensify.

These movements will be given additional impetus as China’s structural decline becomes increasingly obvious and its imports of Australian iron ore and other minerals decline. It is reminiscent of the 1950s when Australians lived off the sheep’s back but, unlike today, when demand for wool declined Australia could turn to mineral exports and to manufacturing, then 30 per cent of the economy. Today manufacturing is five per cent. With the highest power prices in Asia-Pacific, Australia has no Plan B.

Being richly endowed is one thing. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves but is now an impoverished Chinese colony. Victoria is leading Australia down that path.